Early losers: Average Arsenal playing averagely

The Arsenal players didn’t play that badly, they just don’t have very good players. Mikel Arteta’s side fluffed a huge opportunity on Saturday against another team with nothing to play for. January inertia, as EVERYONE warned, has cost them dear.

Arsenal couldn’t get anything going. A team that was scoring some beautiful goals a little over a month ago through quick movement and one touch football, now looks incredible short of ideas. That goes with a lack of confidence, but also, more simply, a lack of quality footballers.

Cedric Soares has been praised to the hilt by Arteta in recent weeks, but wasted every dead-ball situation he had on Saturday and is very much in the old school category of full-backs – those with energy and grit, for whom a decent cross a game is a bonus not an expectation. Southampton – Cedric’s former employers – have two better right-backs, Kyle Walker-Peters and Tino Livramento, and that shouldn’t be the case given their relative budgets. Cedric is fine, but that’s the case for far too many members of this Arsenal squad.

Granit Xhaka is fine. Eddie Nketiah is fine. Albert Sambi Lokonga is (currently) fine. Nuno Taveres is fine on a good day. And when the best players, like Bukayo Saka, like Martin Odegaard, are inexperienced, they can’t and shouldn’t be expected to carry their mediocre teammates through every game of the season. Those players aren’t devoid of blame, they were far from their best and both Saka and Emile Smith Rowe had very good opportunities that were saved expertly by Fraser Forster, but they shouldn’t have given the goalkeeper any chance. No brilliant player can be brilliant all the time, let alone relative youngsters. They need (and please excuse the simplicity of this